Howdi, Fortunately my requirements were pretty modest -- just getting mail to leave the nest was sufficient, really. smail did this fairly painlessly, so of course I was emotionally attached to it. apt-cache searches showed me zmailer (ostensibly the fastest in the west?), but the rest of the description was too scarey.
Anyway, sparc-smail is now added to NTP and VNC-sparc on my impressively short list of things Debianish that failed to work as expected by simply apt-get'ing them. (And I'm happy to blame NTP's failings on the Solaris legacy systems here anyway.) exim, of course, works out of the box. Thanks to the two people who suggested I follow that path. Now I just need to battle the Groupwise weenies whose system likes to delay incoming mail for a good half hour. Jedd. PS. I can confirm that relaying is turned off by default ; )